Mobilizing Communities for Change: Suzanne Lacy's Large-Scale Works

Like many feminist artists connected with the Los Angeles Woman's Building during the 1970s, Suzanne Lacy's early performance work was nurtured and initially received by a supportive, largely feminist community. Starting in 1977, Lacy began a series of large-scale, carefully planned collaborations which reached out to larger audiences. As she began to target non-art audiences, the scale of her pieces increased significantly. In addition, the nature of her collaborations also changed; whereas her earliest col-laborators were drawn almost exclusively from the Los Angeles feminist art community, eventually they came to encompass wider communities of women.